By Jon Takiff

They've been 19 years at the game, winning great acclaim for their frisky playing (sure to get you up and moving) and otherworldly, folkloric material.

Still it remains a delicate dance for Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys to stay on top of the Cajun music scene, especially with the purists, allowed accordionist Riley and his fiddle-playing cohort David Greely, in a chat prompted by their dance concert tonight in Norristown for Allons Danser.

"The reason we still have French-speaking people and traditional Cajun music in Louisiana is that Cajuns don't naturally accept new things," said Greely with a laugh. "They tend to be stubborn, artistically. So performing for them is sort of like a dance. A musician is the leader. You gotta lead well and be strong and convince the audience that this is the way we're going to go. Most of the time, we've gotten pretty good and they go with us. But sometimes, when we introduce something new, they'll tell us they don't care for it - by emptying the dance floor."

Added Riley, "We'll still keep playing the song, though. Eventually they come back."

Singing anything in English is the No. 1 no-no for Cajun musicians, even with younger fans.

Kicking it up a notch with Brazos Huval's basse, Kevin Dugas' baterie and Sam Broussard's guitares electrique et acoustiques is acceptable, so long as the Mamou Playboys' blend doesn't start to sound overtly like pop or rock music, the way its Creole cousin zydeco gets sometimes.

Introducing a totally new, original song won't court favor nearly as well as digging up and adapting an ancient French poem - a favorite Greely pursuit. And what the crowd really wants to hear are traditional Cajun tunes from the repertoires of musical saints Dewey Balfa (with whom Riley apprenticed), Iry Lejeune, D.L. Menard and Aldus Rogers.

"Some of our songs can be traced back 400 years," said the fiddler man.

Their long history as an oppressed people is what makes the Cajuns so stubborn, said Riley, whose family roots reach back to the 1600s. Originally French migrants to Nova Scotia, where they were known as Acadians, these colonists were kicked out of Canada when the British took over, and flocked to Louisiana in 1765.

"There they became acquainted with black people, the Creoles, and started hearing their music full of blues and syncopated rhythms. The Cajun people started adapting that and mixing it with their own sounds, and that's how Cajun music came alive," said Riley.

A movement to "Americanize" Cajun youth almost wiped out their distinctive culture in the 1930s and '40s.

"There was this big push when education came to Louisiana," shared Greely. "These kids grew up speaking French, living in isolation down on the farm. Teachers told them it wasn't real French, that no one else in the world could understand it. Kids were punished for speaking French on the school grounds. Because of ridicule, it came to represent ignorance. It wasn't until World War II, when soldiers going off to war in France found out they could communicate perfectly, that they realized how they'd been lied to. That started the cultural push back."

The southwestern Louisiana town of Lafayette, home to the Mamou Playboys, and surrounding areas remain the stronghold for Cajun culture today.

"The way we celebrate Mardi Gras is also quite different than you'd see elsewhere," said Riley. Quite a sight, he shared, are the masses of masked celebrants marching on foot or riding horses through the countryside, begging for charity from farm owners and chasing down chickens to be served up in a holiday gumbo.

"When you see something like that, you think, 'It really is another world - like a country within a country - over here.' "